Installing VMware Tools from the Command Line with the Tar Installer
The first steps are performed on the host, within Workstation menus:
1. Power on the virtual machine.
2. After the guest operating system has started, prepare your virtual machine to install VMware Tools.
Choose VM > Install VMware Tools.
The remaining steps take place inside the virtual machine.
3. As root (su -), mount the VMware Tools virtual CD-ROM image, change to a working directory (for example, /tmp), uncompress the installer, then unmount the CD-ROM image.
Note: Some Linux distributions automatically mount CD-ROMs. If your distribution uses automounting, do not use the mount and umount commands below. You still must untar the VMware Tools installer to /tmp.
Some Linux distributions use different device names or organize the /dev directory differently. If your CD-ROM drive is not /dev/cdrom or if the mount point for a CD-ROM is not /mnt/cdrom, you must modify the following commands to reflect the conventions used by your distribution.
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cd /tmp
Note: If you have a previous installation, delete the previous vmware-distrib directory before installing. The default location of this directory is
/tmp/vmware-tools-distrib.
4. Untar the VMware Tools tar file:
tar zxpf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-5.0.0-
umount /dev/cdrom
Where
Note: If you attempt to install a tar installation over an rpm installation - or the reverse - the installer detects the previous installation and must convert the installer database format before continuing.
5. Run the VMware Tools tar installer:
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
Respond to the configuration questions on the screen. Press Enter to accept the default value.
6. Log off of the root account. exit
7. Start X and your graphical environment.
8. In an X terminal, launch the VMware Tools background application.
Note: You may run VMware Tools as root or as a normal user. To shrink virtual disks, you must run VMware Tools as root (su -).
Via: VMware
